Ryan MacMillan

Don’t miss Catherine Bennett’s brilliant demolition job on Johnathan Evans, the new head of MI5 who spoke of “the al-Qaida brand”. Bennett, suitably unimpressed by the very notion, reacts with what we might call majesterial scorn:

Ever fancied running your own terrorist cell but worried about where you would find the ideology? Every year, more and more people are finding out just how easy it can be, by taking out a franchise with al-Qaida, the internationally recognised brand, which comes with all the tried and tested marketing tools, thorough training regime and existing portfolio of victims that will allow you to get straight on with self-righteous acts of mass homicide, while other start-up terrorists are still searching for that vital sense of mission. Al-Qaida - forget the rest, go for the best!”

Read the whole article here in today’s Guardian; it’s a splendid evisceration of brand-speak’s mission-creep into the least likely of places.